The outpouring of grief after the sudden death of 52-year-old musician Zubeen Garg while scuba-diving in Singapore last month jolted his native Assam state in northeastern India, and much of the region, into mourning - even those who had not heard of him before the tragedy.

The open, uninhibited, and united grieving by the people of Assam at the death of their kind-hearted, courageous, and universally loved songster-hero suggests that humanity’s heart responds to frankness offered by a gifted artist.

The public sentiment also showed that years of state-sponsored propaganda aimed at dividing communities cannot destroy human beings’ ability to recognize the real deal, to know what is fair, what is false, what is beautiful.

Assam is far from Delhi. Only a narrow strip of land between Bhutan and Bangladesh connects the large state to the rest of India. Assam’s rhinoceros, its mighty Brahmaputra River, its tea gardens, its landscapes and its distinctive yet diverse people have given it the character of a nation within the wider Indian nation. And from time to time, it has been easy for the wider nation’s immense numbers to ignore Assam’s existence.

Unprecedented scenes

After hundreds of thousands came out on the streets, openly sobbing, to receive Garg’s body that was flown from Singapore to Assam, the rest of India had to sit up and take notice. Not everyone. Establishment India and some media houses found it hard to rise to the occasion. However, Ravish Kumar, the independent television journalist watched by millions, presented the scale and depth of Assam’s love for Zubeen in a YouTube video that is more powerful than I can describe.

Ravish Kumar’s powerful tribute to Zubeen Garg

Another fearless YouTuber, Abhisar Sharma, also conveyed Zubeen’s place in Assam to viewers well before every TV channel in India was obliged to present scenes of the unprecedented crowds that attended the singer’s last rites in Guwahati, Assam’s largest city.

Abhisar Sharma’s report on the pain of Assam due to the demise of Zubin Garg.

With an honesty that matched his vision, Ravish Kumar admitted that until the outpouring of grief at Zubeen’s death, he had not heard of him. It was an admission that even in our brilliantly connected times a wall of ignorance may exist between one genius and another (I consider Ravish also to be a genius), and between different parts of one nation.

The story that Kumar then gathered and presented about Zubeen’s place in the hearts of the people of Assam and of the entire Northeast, and of how Zubeen won that place not only with his irresistible singing but also with acts of courage and giving, including during the Covid years, is one that people in Assam and the rest of India will be reciting to one another for a long time to come. It’s a story that will unite, inspire, and embolden.

“He feared nobody. He spoke his heart out. And he was extremely generous. Can you think of any other celebrity like that?” said Bimugdha Goswami, a fan at a large gathering in Guwahati, quoted in a BBC report about Garg.

Born in 1972 into an Assamese Brahmin family in Tura in Meghalaya, one of Assam’s neighboring states, Zubeen was named after the composer, Zubin Mehta. It appears that he took on the last name Garg for himself in order to avoid a caste-disclosing one.

Antidote to fear

Surfacing before he was three, Zubeen’s bond with music would eventually result, we are told, in more than 30,000 songs, mainly in Assamese, Bengali, and Hindi, but also in 40 other languages and dialects, including Manipuri, Boro, Dimasa, English, Karbi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Mising, Nepali, Bhojpuri, Odia, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, and Telugu.

Some of these are languages of the Northeast, a place where noticing variations from one another within the region is as important as recognizing the region’s distinctiveness from “heartland” India.

In 2006, the popularity of Zubeen’s song “Ya Ali” in the film Gangster brought him fame and told the people of Assam that their native son was an honoured figure on a much wider stage. This is the song a Pakistani band sang recently in Karachi in tribute to their late Indian colleague, a move embraced across borders, prevailing over the current tensions between the two countries.

If singing in Bengali and Hindi required courage in Assam, where pride in the Assamese language is deep, singing a seemingly “Islamic” song like “Ya Ali” demanded greater courage. Or at least so one might think, for alleged “illegal immigration” from adjacent Bangladesh, where Muslims form 85 per cent of the population, has for years been presented to Assam, where Muslims are around 35% and to the Northeast as a whole as “the greatest danger” to the region’s security.

It appears that Zubeen brushed aside irrational fears even when drummed up by powerful people. An interest in those who live next to you, in those you run into or pass by, and a wish to assist them if they were in need and you could be of help, plus an ability to convey this goodwill in an unforgettable line of song, made Zubeen the vehicle of an antidote to fear.

After he died, one of the first to remind “heartland” India of Zubeen’s place in the hearts of the people of Assam was a writer or journalist called Anee Haralu, who Ravish Kumar frequently quotes in his video. This writer’s last name suggests a connection with the Nagas of the Northeast, neighbors with whom the Assamese have not always seen eye to eye. Those who know their Northeast will appreciate what it means when one who is probably a Naga brings an Assamese to the attention of all of India.

Adored and unruly

In Haralu’s words, Zubeen was “unruly, adored, and perpetually half in defiance. He entered protest, then stepped away from it. He spoke against the Citizenship Amendment Act, and the crowd answered like thunder. He later said Assam would not accept the Act and asked for calm. He liked the street more than the halls. But he liked the stage most of all.”

Widely seen as discriminatory against Muslims, the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 was criticized by opposition parties in the Northeast and also in West Bengal. One of the Act’s most vocal champions was and is Assam’s BJP chief minister, 56-year-old Himanta Biswa Sarma.

Sarma is a driven politician with, we are told, higher ambitions. The “Muslim threat” to Assam has been his ceaseless theme. Still, Sarma announced a four-day mourning for Zubeen. Another BJP-run state, Arunachal Pradesh, neighboring Assam and bordering China, also observed three days of mourning for Zubeen’s passing.

Perhaps the Zubeen Garg story is one answer to a question asked across the world. Is hope visible anywhere?

Since September 21 and 22, when ten more countries recognized Palestine, leaving just the U.S.A., Japan, Germany, and Italy among the few countries yet to do so, we have seen a peace deal emerge, offering cautious hope.

There is no doubt about what Zubeen Garg would have said or sung. The weak and the poorly armed are not allowed to be humiliated in the world he sought. What we need is the Zubeen Gargs in different parts of our world to “speak their hearts out” and demand an end to the horror.

(The author is a journalist, historian, author, and former professor of history. . He has served as a member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of India’s Parliament. The grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, he has written extensively on India’s political and moral history, with a focus on reconciliation and justice. By special arrangment with Sapan in collaboration with We Are One Humanity)